


Perspective

by crzy_wrtr10



Series: Special Investigations and Tactical Response Unit AU [6]
Category: The Musketeers (2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Angst and Humor, Athos is grumpy, Author regrets nothing, Bedside Vigils, Blood, Boys Will Be Boys, Canon-Typical Violence, Cuddling & Snuggling, Drugs, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, F/M, Families of Choice, First Meetings, First Time, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Friendship/Love, Hallucinations, Hospitals, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Idiots Will Be Idiots, Indiscriminate Whumping, Law Enforcement, M/M, Medical Inaccuracies, Medical Procedures, Medical Trauma, Military Inaccuracies, Original Character(s), Platonic Cuddling, Platonic Male/Male Relationships, Platonic Relationships, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, SITRU AU, Slice of Life, Some Humor, Stealth Crossover, Team as Family, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, Violence, Weapons, Whump, all the feels ever, author is crazy, pop culture references, so much whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-04
Updated: 2015-02-04
Packaged: 2018-03-10 11:11:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,095
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3288137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crzy_wrtr10/pseuds/crzy_wrtr10
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“The hell do you think <b>you’re</b> doing?” He squirmed. “I am a paramedic. That man is injured. I am going to render aid, and you, my behemoth friend, are going to get off of me.”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>“Behemoth.” There was a snort. “That’s a new one.”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>“I’m not kidding,” John said. “Let me up. Or, you know, at least buy me dinner first,” he added, as someone pulled his wallet from his back pocket, along with his badge. </i>
</p><p>
  <i>“I’ll think about it,” the voice said dryly, “but you’re not really my type.”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>“American?” A second voice, one that sounded older, spoke for the first time. “What’s an American doing in Quebec City?”</i>
</p><p>
  <i>He rested his forehead on the backs of his hands and slowly counted to five. “Well, it starts with a funeral, has a frisky middle, and ends with a violation of the Hippocratic Oath.”</i>
</p><p> </p><p>Or: The first times, failed attempts, second tries, and general life and times of Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and d'Artagnan, Team One of Quebec City's Special Investigations and Tactical Response Unit as narrated by paramedic John Friedline, who always somehow seems to be along for the ride.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Perspective

**Author's Note:**

> Hello lovelies. :) 
> 
> This is, basically, 20k worth of words about the SITRU as seen from an outside perspective - John the paramedic (who we've met in other chapters). First of all, a huge, HUGE THANK YOU goes to [JakartaInn](http://archiveofourown.org/users/JakartaInn/pseuds/JakartaInn) who was a endless wealth of encouragement for this fic from start to finish. Seriously. I can't thank her enough. Shout out to [akathecentimetre](http://archiveofourown.org/users/akathecentimetre/pseuds/akathecentimetre) for some French translations and general awesomeness. 
> 
> I'm not a paramedic. I was once a lifeguard, but now the only interaction I have with the medical community is that of a patient. I've tried to make things as accurate as possible, but if I've totally bungled something up, please do let me know, and I'll do my best to fix it. Google is awesome. And I shipped my own OCs like FedEx. 
> 
> Also, I'm so sorry it's been so long since I've updated. Life got a little nuts. And I finished a novel. 
> 
> I cannot say this enough - thank you. Each and every one of you that reads and re-reads this series over and over again. Ya'll are the best. Seriously. And I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. 
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> **WARNING:**  
>  **There is medical drama, bodily fluids, blood, gunshots, and explicit violence/cruelty. If those things bother you, you might be squicked and/or triggered by this fic. Just a heads up. :)**

Sometimes, John Friedline wished he’d never stayed in Canada.

He’d originally gone over the northern border when his grandmother died, driving from Buffalo to Toronto, the picking up King’s Highway 401 all the way to Montreal. From there it was gas and go on Autoroute 40 to Quebec City. She hadn’t lived in the city itself, but rather in Beaumont, a place far enough away form the hustle and bustle to be considered, in some ways, in the country.

The funeral service was lovely. His grandmother had been a great lady and a hell of a nurse. She was the reason John had gone into the medical field himself. He was a paramedic, and a good one, too, to deal with working in the poorer, more underdeveloped portions of urban Buffalo. He could handle high-as-kites drug addicts, gang shootings, and the occasional crotchety old man who _didn’t have no damn need for no damn hospital!_

What he apparently couldn’t handle was the fact his grandmother had left him her house.

The need for someplace to think – and his own curiosity – were the reasons he ventured into Quebec City proper a few nights before he was due back to work in Buffalo. He wasn’t any closer to figuring out what to do about his housing problem.

And that was before an SUV deliberately ran a red light to smash into the back end of another, damn near causing a four car pileup in the intersection he’d been about to cross.

“Call nine-one-one or whatever the hell it is you do in this country,” he snapped to the gaping spectator nearest him. After double-checking traffic was stopped in all directions, he darted out into the intersection.

One of the SUVs lay on its side, and his sneakers crunched on broken glass as he crouched to look through the cracked windshield. The driver stared back at him.

“Hey, buddy,” John said loudly, ignoring the growing commotion around him. Passerby were chattering to themselves, and the sound of sirens grew louder in the distance. “I’m John. I don’t look like it, but I’m a paramedic. Don’t move.”

The man’s forehead furrowed; John looked for a way in that didn’t have him performing parkour to get through the passenger door, and noted the windshield frame had cracked in places. He hooked his fingers under it, thankful for safety glass, and peeled it slowly back.

He got on his knees, immensely grateful for rough denim, and stuck his shoulders awkwardly through the gap. “Hey. I’m John. I’m a paramedic. Can you tell me what hurts?”

The man said nothing.

John shimmied forward a little more; the man’s eyes widened, though there was a glint of something in them. Whether it was a trick of the low light or what, he shoved his sleeves up and –

Was unceremoniously hauled backward out of the vehicle by a firm grip on the back of his belt. He hit the pavement with a whump, and only something hard – a knee or boot, by the feel of it – in the small of his back prevented him from getting up.

“The hell do you think you’re doing?” a voice demanded above him.

“The hell do you think _you’re_ doing?” He squirmed. “I am a paramedic. That man is injured. I am going to render aid, and you, my behemoth friend, are going to get off of me.”

“Behemoth.” There was a snort. “That’s a new one.”

“I’m not kidding,” John said. “Let me up. Or, you know, at least buy me dinner first,” he added, as someone pulled his wallet from his back pocket, along with his badge.

“I’ll think about it,” the voice said dryly, “but you’re not really my type.”

“American?” A second voice, one that sounded older, spoke for the first time. “What’s an American doing in Quebec City?”

He rested his forehead on the backs of his hands and slowly counted to five. “Well, it starts with a funeral, has a frisky middle, and ends with a violation of the Hippocratic Oath.”

“He ain’t died yet.”

“Not the point,” John growled. “Let me up. Please.”

It was either the please that did it, or they’d figured he’d been facedown in the dirt enough, but John found himself lifted easily back to his feet. He wasn’t small, though the man in front of him required him, at five-foot-ten, to tip his head to meet his eyes.

He’d stared down addicts on withdrawal, pimps, dealers, and on memorable occasion, some idiot tripping badly on LSD and mushrooms, and he hadn’t flinched. He didn’t intend to start now.

“You tell me right now why you didn’t allow me to help that man and the reason better be damn good,” he demanded as QCPD cars and more nondescript black SUVs pulled up. An ambulance rumbled to a stop some distance away.

“We have evidence to suspect this man is responsible for the torture and murder of four teenagers,” the other man – who was older, and possibly in charge – said. “He evaded arrest and is considered armed and dangerous.”

“He’s got a weapon?” John asked, stepping back to allow more officers and uniformed paramedics to get closer to the downed vehicle.

“Could have. We don’t know. And we don’t take chances with that kind of stuff,” the younger man said. “Not with you lot.”

“Porthos,” the older man said, handing him John’s wallet and badge before he strode across the pavement to the commotion at the SUV.

John wiped glass off his front. “This happen a lot?”

The man – Porthos – shrugged. “This is a slow week for us.”

“Huh.” He stood there, seemingly lost in thought, and found himself asking, “They hiring?”

And that was how John found himself driving back through Ontario about a week later, car stuffed with the contents of his Buffalo apartment, and a new job waiting for him in Quebec City.

 

John was seriously thinking about selling his grandmother’s house in Beaumont and moving someplace closer to the hospital the next time he saw Porthos. By that time he’d heard numerous stories and rumors surrounding the men of the Special Investigations and Tactical Response Unit.

The general consensus among the paramedic squad was that those boys were batshit crazy.

He wasn’t sure whether he believed it or not, since he hadn’t had anything but the usual scrapes and bruises to deal with after one of their ops. Until the day they drove up after the SITRU boys had taken down a meth lab in the middle of suburbia.

John hiked his overstuffed backpack higher on his shoulder and gestured between the QCPD officer and the door. “Am I good to go in?” The officer motioned him on, and he took the porch steps two at a time. He crossed the threshold and whistled lowly.

The peeling paint could have been any other neglected house, but what really made the ‘80’s décor worth it was the numerous bullet holes in the sheetrock. He glanced over at a group of gathered officers, held up his index finger, and asked, “Finger spasms, boys?”

One rolled his eyes. “You’re lookin’ for Porthos. He’s in the kitchen.”

“Thank you, gentlemen.” He gave them a sloppy sort of salute, and meandered toward the kitchen. His boots hit the linoleum and he took the scene with a quiet focus. Porthos sat in a chair that had seen better days. There was an officer leaning against the counter to his right, and since he didn’t appear to be a threat, John ignored him for the time being.

“Hey, big man,” he said, slinging his backpack carefully onto the table. It looked a little too unstable for much roughhousing. “That’s a fair amount of blood.”

The right side of Porthos’s forehead and cheek were red.

John snapped on a pair of gloves, and tilted Porthos’s head back with gentle fingers under his chin. “Can you tell me your name?”

“Porthos du Vallon,” he said, eyes closed briefly as John prodded at the split skin by his hairline.

“Great. I’m assuming that’s your name.” _That_ drew a snort from the officer by the counter. “Do you know where you are?”

“Rue Rochette.” His eyes opened again. “Meth lab bust.”

“Yep. Two for two,” John added, snagging his penlight from the cargo pocket of his uniform pants. “Do you remember me?”

Porthos snorted. “That damn American who was crawlin’ through a windshield.” He winced at the penlight but didn’t pull away. Not that he could; John had one hand on the back of his head.

“Awesome.” He stuck his penlight back in his pocket. “Right. My initial assessment is that you are mildly concussed, and you need crazy glue for that hard head of yours, at least. Possibly some stitches.” He smiled brightly. “So we’re gonna load your ass in the back of the ambulance, and you’re gonna take a ride with us.”

“I gotta ride with you?” Porthos asked, the corner of his mouth twitching up.

“I can drive, if you’d rather sit through that,” John said dryly. “My driving and your concussion? The paper can back there ain’t big enough for that.” He looked over at the other office. “You take his other side? And give me a little warning if you’re gonna heave, my boots are new.”

They let Porthos get up on his own, hands out and ready to grab him if it looked like he was going to go over. He wobbled a little, but otherwise moved under his own power through the house and out the ambulance. Getting him up and in was a little tricky, but they soon had him settled on the gurney.

“Seat up front for you, Officer,” he said, a hand on both the back doors. He could hear his partner already calling ahead to the hospital from the driver’s seat.

“Athos,” the officer said.

“Athos,” John repeated. “Nice to meet you.” And then he slammed the back of the ambulance shut.

 

“Would you _relax_!”

John’s eyebrows headed for his forehead. He’d never heard Athos raise his voice – granted, he’d only been working in QC for about three months, but those three months had given him plenty of time to get to know some of the Musketeers better. Most notably Porthos and Athos.

He whistled sharply when he was a few feet away, drawing their attention to him rather than Athos’s bleeding arm. “Hey, boys.”

“You stop for coffee on your way here or what?” Porthos asked, though the crease between his eyebrows lessened considerably.

“Nah.” John knelt by Athos’s side and tugged a pair of gloves from his pocket. “Can’t find a Dunkin Donuts anywhere in this town.”

“You could always go to Tim’s,” Athos murmured.

“I might have let you stick a maple leaf on my arm,” he said, nodding his chin toward the patch on his left sleeve, “but I’ll be damned if I turn traitor on my coffee. Let me see, Athos. Move your hand.” The last part was gentle, and he cradled the back of Athos’s bicep with one hand while the other helped ease Athos’s own bloody fingers away.

“Timmy’s is good,” Porthos protested from somewhere over John’s shoulder. “It’s Canadian. Ain’t you supposed to be naturalizin’, anyway?”

John ripped Athos’s dress shirt sleeve a little further and felt for an exit wound. No luck. “Naturalizing is one thing, subjecting my taste buds to torture is another.”

He slung his backpack off his shoulder, and ripped off his gloves. It took a little digging, but he found the gauze pads he needed, along with another pair of gloves. If he hadn’t found any of those, he had more in his cargo pocket, next to his penlight.

“Are you really naturalizing?” Athos asked.

“Probably should start thinking about it. Allergies to medications?”

“No.”

“Lovely. Though I am seriously thinking about finding an apartment that’s more in Quebec than Beaumont.” John pulled out a pouch from the bottom of the bag. “Scale of one to ten, with one being totally fine and ten feeling like someone’s hacking at you without anesthesia, can you rate your pain for me?”

Athos tipped his head slightly to the side, considering. “About five. I have been shot.”

“Yeah, you have.” He snapped on another pair of gloves. “I’m going to give you something to kill the pain, wrap your arm up, and then we’ll take a ride to the ER. You don’t have an exit wound. Doc’s either gonna wanna fish it out for you or send you to surgery. We’ll see when we get there.”

Porthos crouched on Athos’s other side, evidently ready to lend a hand should John need it.

“Alright, Athos. Hey, nope,” John said, using the backs of his fingers to push Athos’s chin up and turn his head toward Porthos. “Deep breaths, head up, look at Porthos. He’s going to make funny faces at you. Little poke.” He waited until Athos was preoccupied with the hysterical expression Porthos was pulling to inject the painkiller in his forearm. “Need you on this side of La La Land, okay, so keep taking those deep breaths for me.” He capped the syringe, and made quick work of wrapping up Athos’s bullet wound. Once that was done, he shrugged his backpack on again.

“Ready?” Porthos asked.

“I think so.” John stayed crouched, balanced on the balls of his feet in his boots. “Scale of one to accidental dismemberment, what’s your pain at now?”

Athos rested his head back against the wall and rolled it so he could look at John. “Pain? What pain?”

He grinned. “Exactly. Let Porthos and I do the work, okay? We’re going to get you up.” He took careful hold of the injured arm, and they heaved him upright. Athos swayed, but otherwise stayed up.

“We – we goin’?” Athos asked as they started to frog-march him toward the waiting ambulance.

“Yeah, we’re goin’. You have a date with the ER doc.” John slid one hand down to wrap careful fingers around Athos’s wrist and take his pulse. “Deep breaths.”

He obligingly sucked one in, and asked, in an endearing tone of befuddled and amused, “I have a date?”

“Yeah, buddy,” he said, straight-faced and heedless of Porthos’s stifled snort. “We’ll set you up, no worries.”

 

It was always a bit of a clue about how much shit had hit the fan by the number of ambulances and paramedics on standby at the site of a bust. As John and his partner weren’t even initially called in for it, the fact that they were currently rolling up on scene meant the whole thing had turned into a clusterfuck of epic proportions.

He ducked under the caution tape surrounding the perimeter, and nodded at Athos. “Where are we at?”

Athos tugged on the neck of his Kevlar vest and drawled, “Well, it appears to be an old storage unit that’s been misappropriated by the wrong kinds of people for nefarious purposes which we have since put a stop to.”

John stopped and outright stared.

“You walked right into that one,” he said, the corners of his mouth twitching upward.

“You’re right. I did. You win this round, Maple Syrup. But I’ll get you next time.”

“I sincerely doubt it, Yankee. But you can try.” Athos jerked his head. “We’re still working at sorting everybody out. Serious injuries have already been taken back to QC.”

“Fantastic.” John followed Athos into one of the storage units. Or, should have been. Someone had given it a makeover, and rather than be a traditional garage-type containment, the middle was hollowed out and turned into one large room. He whistled lowly.

“Someone had to have had some serious cash to do this,” he added at Athos’s raised eyebrows.

“Drug money, apparently,” Porthos said as he sauntered over. “Athos. Cowboy.”

John rolled his eyes. “You do know I’m a New Yorker, right?”

“Would you rather I call you Brooklyn?” he asked, grinning.

“I’m going to get you a map,” he said slowly, eyebrows headed for his hairline, “and I’m going to label on that map where Buffalo is, and you’re going to learn American geography.”

Porthos blanked his features into the most compelling – and utterly bullshit, if Athos’s snort was anything to go by – innocence he could muster. “But isn’t Brooklyn part of New York?”

“It’s part of New York City. There’s a difference. I’ll get you a map,” he added, though he had the suspicion Porthos’s confusion was just for show.

“Can’t wait.” Porthos let his expression mellow out a bit, and it slunk back toward concern. “Can you do me a favor, now that you’re here? Can you take a look at Elliott?”

“Yeah, sure. That’s what they pay me for.” He pulled his backpack a little higher up his shoulder and followed Porthos toward the wreckage of what looked like packing crates. Or what used to be packing crates; there was pretty much only chunks of wood and some serious shrapnel left over, and SITRU psychologist standing amidst the wreckage. He was about John’s height, and where he was on the lean side, Elliott had a bit more muscle on his frame.

“Hey, buddy,” John said, waiting patiently for Elliott’s attention to swing around to him. Reaction time was decent, and he kept that in the back of his mind. “I’m John. I’m a paramedic.”

“Of – of course.” Elliott twisted his fingers together, green eyes wide and slightly glazed. “Is this – am I in shock?”

“Little bit, probably.” He glanced at Porthos, then back at Elliott. “You wanna tell me what happened?”

“It was supposed to be routine and it – they were so many of them,” he said, beginning to shake. “They shot – my team – do you know how they are?”

“If they’ve been taken to the hospital then they’re getting the best care they can get. Promise.” John tugged a pair of gloves from his side cargo pocket. “Can you tell me your name?”

“Elliott Perdeauz. I’m a – the psychologist. For the Garrison.”

“Awesome. God only knows what these guys think of on a regular basis. Especially this one.” He jerked his chin toward Porthos but kept the majority of his attention on Elliott’s face, which had been growing steadily whiter by the minute. “I’m gonna take your pulse, and I want you to take some deep breaths for me, okay? Try to relax a little.”

Nodding, Elliott took a deep breath. Or tried to, at any rate. It hitched in his chest, and he blanched.

John motioned for Porthos to come a little closer, and said quietly, “Use your radio to get someone to get Gene and the gurney from the ambulance. I think we have a problem here, so don’t go too far, because I’m probably going to need your muscle.” He turned back to his patient, and the first thing he noted was the pinched forehead. “Elliott?”

“Hurts.”

“Let’s get your vest off. Can we do that?” He peeled the Velcro back on both sides and lifted it over Elliott’s head like a sandwich board.

And there they were on Elliott’s lower left side, two bleeding bullet holes. Someone must have had just the right angle to sneak them in between the bottom edge of his vest and the waist of his pants.

The sound of loud voices could be heard behind him, along with the rattle of the gurney as it made its across the floor.

“Elliott. Elliott.” John waited until he had the man’s full attention. “Keep taking those nice breaths for me, deep as you can without it hurting. You’ve been shot, buddy.” He gently used his knuckles to keep Elliott from dipping his chin to look at his torso. “Nope. I need your head up. Look at me. I’m going to look for you once we get you settled on the gurney, okay? You trust me?”

Elliott’s eyes flickered toward Porthos, and whatever he saw there made him nod jerkily in John’s direction.

“Great. This is Gene, he’s my partner for today. We’re going to make sure you get patched up and can deal with the rest of these crazies for as long as you want ‘em. Sound good?”

He didn’t put up much of a fuss, preferring to stare at John’s face and keep taking as slow and even breaths as he could, as per instruction. They took off for the ambulance, and once they had the gurney loaded, John was only mildly surprised when Porthos climbed in the back with them and shut the doors.

“His team lead is already at the hospital,” Porthos said quietly. “Someone should go with him.”

“Call it in and roll it out, Gene!” John hooked an oxygen mask over Elliott’s mouth and nose. “Did you know Porthos makes funny faces?”

Elliott’s eyebrows rose, and he dutifully looked over at Porthos for comfirmation.

John took advantage of the momentary distraction to establish an IV in the crook of Elliott’s right arm and then attacked his dress shirt with a pair of industrial scissors. He peeled the fabric away from the entry wounds, and shoved his hand under Elliott to feel for an exit hole. There weren’t any. He pressed a few gauze pads down over both holes, holding them tightly, and snaring Elliott’s free hand when it went to slap at him.

“Leave this here,” he said, folding Elliott’s arm across his chest. “You’re doing fantastic, Elliott.”

“Ten minutes out!” Gene called from up front.

“Let’s talk about your pain level, okay?”

“S’my team?” Elliott slurred the moment John moved the oxygen mask for him to answer his question.

“They’re at the hospital,” John said. He checked the state of the gauze under his hand, and then patiently waited for Elliott to meet his eyes again. “Can you rate your pain for me? Scale of one to why is there no anesthesia for this?”

Elliott huffed out a small approximation of a laugh. “Can’t – can’t really feel it.”

“Can you feel your legs? Your toes?”

“Yeah.”

He heard more than saw Porthos’s relieved breath.

“Elliott? Elliott, look at me.” John tapped Elliott’s cheek as his head lolled on the pillow, his eyes briefly rolling back in his head. “Look at me, Elliott.”

Porthos squeezed the man’s hand tighter, hoping to bring him around. John’s fingers slid to his free arm, searching for his pulse, and found it, weak but steady.

“Hang on, buddy,” he murmured as the ambulance rumbled to a stop and half a dozen nurses threw open the back doors.

 

John looked at the boxes piled in his living room, thought about how much space was in his Jeep Cherokee, and, while he’d never been dazzlingly good with math, knew it didn’t add up.

“Well, shit,” he muttered. This was going to take a lot longer than he’d originally planned.

“Looks like you need a hand, Yankee.”

He turned, tossing his biggest grin toward Athos. “Always knew you were a sap, Maple Syrup.”

Athos twitched. “I’m not going to dignify that with an answer.”

“Thought you could maybe use a hand,” Porthos said with a small wave.

“I should have just rented a U-Haul,” John muttered. Scrubbed a hand over his face, and froze when he let it drop to his side. “They let you out of the hospital?”

Elliott gave a small shrug. “Uh, yeah? Figured I could come give you hand.”

He blinked, glancing over at Athos and Porthos, and then finally went back to staring at Elliott until the man began to flush. He didn’t fidget, and John chalked that up to having to deal with anything and everything out of the minds of QC’s finest on a regular basis.

“They let you out of the hospital? You didn’t sign yourself out?” he repeated.

“Been out a week,” Elliott said smoothly. “Instructions of ‘if it hurts, don’t do it’.”

John blinked. “Okay. But if I see signs you’re overdoing it, I’m going to be pissed.”

He rolled both his eyes and his sleeves. “You do realize I’m a grown man, right?”

Porthos snickered loudly; Athos’s mouth twitched, a sure sign he was fighting at least a smirk.

“Yeah,” John said, gesturing to the two SITRU officers in his kitchen, “and so are they, but I don’t think they know the definition of the word ‘self-preservation’ any more than a damn lemming does.”

Elliott grinned. “What do you think they pay _me_ for? Giggles?”

He gaped like a guppy.

“It would help, perhaps, if you told us what you were taking and what was staying?” Athos said quietly.

John shook himself. He had a house to move, after all.

 

“How many bodies are we looking at?”

The QCPD officer shrugged.

“Any of our people?” John asked, hiking his backpack further up his shoulder as Gene trailed along behind with the gurney.

He snapped off something in French. John looked instinctively at Gene, who rattled something back in the same language, though none of them broke stride. Gene said something again, and the officer stopped.

“Fuck this,” he muttered, ducking around the QCPD officer and jogging the rest of the way to Athos, Porthos, and who he assumed was finally their third officer. Rumor had it Treville had been doing some shuffling, and was trying to find the right combination of men per team. Water cooler gossip had him waffling back and forth between three- and four-man teams.

He knelt, snapping on a pair of gloves, and digging through his bag for the things to start an IV with. Once he had that established, he tuned back in on the conversation between the man and Athos.

“ – moved to Toronto. Went through the training program for the SRU, and became a sniper.”

John noted the aborted move toward Athos when he made him move.

“Scale of one to ten how’s your pain?” From the increasing rattle, Gene and the officer must have settled whatever had initially pissed them off and the gurney was finally coming.

“Four,” the young man grunted, gritting his teeth as John applied pressure to his side. “How’s Porthos?”

“Big man with a head like granite?”

“John,” Athos said warningly.

 _Newbie newb, then._ “He’s fine, not even a concussion,” he said, pushing something into the port in the IV. We have a few minutes before you go floating off to La La Land. Can you stand to get to the gurney or do we need to lift you?”

“Stand.”

He nodded. “Let us do the work, okay? And let me know if you’re going to hurl.” John felt more than saw the bigger presence loom over him, and he passed the IV bag to Porthos. “Hold this.” He crouched, one hand over the hole in the younger – though not by much, holy hell, where did they _find_ these guys – and his other hand on his arm. He looked over at Athos on the other side. “On my count.”

Once he and Athos had him upright, the man sagged until his knees remembered to take his weight. John and Athos got him straightened out, and strapped in, and they took off for the ambulance. The kid had Porthos’s hand in a death grip, which meant Porthos climbed in the back of the ambulance.

With the gurney locked in place, Porthos settled into place, and Gene climbing behind the wheel, John peeled back the gauze to get a look. It still bled. He stripped his gloves off, and wrapped a blood pressure cuff around his patient’s arm.

“Hey, buddy,” John said, watching the rise and fall of the man’s chest briefly before meeting his eyes. “My name’s John. I’m a paramedic.”

“I thought you were an EMT?” Porthos asked, still holding tight to his hand.

“Paramedic. Gene’s an EMT.”

“EMA!” Gene shouted from the driver’s seat. “Get it straight, you damn Yankee!”

“Someone, some day, explain to me why I moved north of the border,” he muttered. He fit his fingers to the inside of his patient’s wrist. “Anyway. Can you tell me your name?”

“Aramis d’Herblay,” he said.

“Awesome.” John grabbed the stethoscope from the rack on the wall, fitted it against the crook of the arm that didn’t have the IV in it, and took his blood pressure. “Bit low, but you’ve lost some blood.” He snapped on another pair of gloves and took a peek under the gauze, whistling lowly. “That’s gonna leave a mark.”

Aramis glanced between Porthos and John, before asking, “What the hell kind of paramedic are you?”

“A damn good one,” he said with a grin, sliding the bell of the stethoscope against Aramis’s chest. “Now, take a good breath for me, okay?”

 

John was hoping for a slow day at the office, so to speak. They’d had a call for an elderly woman who’s blood sugar bottomed out, but other than that, it was one of those days where they sat around the station and more or less looked at each other.

“You got plans for this weekend, Yankee?” Kaci asked, a bottle of water in her hands.

He needed to find himself something new – particularly in French – to call Athos. Take the heat off him for a little while.

“Not a whole lot. Dinner tonight with the significant other.” He shrugged. “Nothin’ major.” Of course that depended on both of them getting out relatively on time, which, well, there was probably a snowball’s chance in hell if he continued to think about it. The universe did like to screw him on occasion.

“That’s pretty cool. My boyfriend’s taking me to a concert, but he won’t tell me what.”

“He wants to surprise you.” John straightened away from where he’d been leaning against the break table. “And women say romance is dead.”

“Because for some of you, romance was never alive to begin with,” she said sweetly, tossing her ponytail over her shoulder.

The side door burst open and half of the SITRU’s Team Two spilled in in full tactical gear. John jerked, automatically putting himself between them and Kaci.

“Grab your bag, Friedliner, you’re comin’ with us,” Etienne said.

“My bag for what? What the hell are you doing here?” He didn’t move.

“Your bag. Enough supplies to treat a gunshot wound on a civilian in a bank.” Etienne stared him down, which was a little difficult to do since John had three or so inches on him height wise. “My orders are to come get you and take you to that scene, where you will receive further instruction from Officer de la Fere.” He raised his eyebrows pointedly. “Now. Get your bag and get moving.”

John swallowed, and went to do as he was told. The look in Etienne’s eye told him someone else would be bodily moving him if he didn’t comply, and he didn’t want that kind of attention. He looked over his shoulder at a rigid Kaci as he followed Etienne out to the street where two all black SUVs sat idling by the curb. Another officer held the back door of the first one open for him, and John crawled in, clutching his backpack on his lap.

The entire ride through the streets of QC was silent and tense, and if John hadn’t been partial to stressful situations he might have had a problem with it beyond the nervous curling and uncurling of his toes in his boots.

They stopped just beyond the barrier at the end of the street opposite the bank. Etienne escorted him all the way to where Athos stood behind a row of QCPD squad cars and a few more of the plain SUVs the SITRU favored. John’s eyebrows headed toward his hairline when he spotted Elliott in a Kevlar vest further on down the line, head to head with Treville.

“Thank you,” Athos said to Etienne, who nodded and went immediately back toward his team. “John. We have a problem.”

Porthos joined them wordlessly, hands resting on the butt of the tactical weapon hanging from the front of his vest.

“We have a hostage situation in the bank at the end of the street,” he continued. “During initial negotiations, the hostages attempted to subdue their captors. Multiple gunshots were fired, and we have at least two injuries.”

John swallowed and asked, “Fatalities?”

“Not that we know of yet,” Porthos said. “Aramis has eyes on most everybody in there, but the second downed civilian was blocked by the others in the initial confusion.”

“And Doc over there is your hostage negotiator?” he asked, pointing toward Elliott.

“He is assisting, from a psychological standpoint.” Athos’s tone was quiet and even, and John let it settle over his fraying nerves like a balm. “We have a truce, at the moment, to allow for one medical professional to go in and assess the situation.”

He blinked, and it dawned on him. “What – you – Athos.”

Porthos unclipped John’s ID badge from his shirt front pocket, and held up a Kevlar vest another officer had just dropped off. John numbly allowed him to put it over his head and yank it down, tightening the Velcro at the side until he felt like he wasn’t going to be able to breathe. He knew it was mostly psychosomatic.

“Put this in,” Athos said, holding out a wireless earpiece even as Porthos slipped the box portion into one of his cargo pockets. He waited until John had put it in his left ear to continue. “You won’t be able to say anything to us, but you’ll be able to hear us – Aramis, Porthos, and I – and I will walk you through what you are to do.”

“Yeah.” John tugged on the neck of the vest. “I’m gonna try and patch up a GSW in a hostile environment. With only two of you as backup.”

“Aramis will have eyes on you,” Porthos repeated, and John stiffened at the tone.

“As per the agreement reached between Treville and a man who wants only to be known as Rue, in order to provide this care to civilians, the medical professional is to be alone.” Athos looked John in the eye. “I will be with you every step of the way. Listen to me, do what you need to do, and we’ll do our best to make sure everyone walks out of there alive today. That’s our goal. Everyone walks out alive.”

Porthos fiddled with the straps on John’s backpack, loosening them until they would comfortably fit over the added padding of the Kevlar. John took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and twitched his shoulders. This was the job he’d signed up for. He’d wanted to help people, and there were at least two in the bank who needed his help right then.

There wasn’t room for nerves when there was work to be done. Head held high, and hoping he looked a hell of a lot braver than he felt, he followed Athos around the semicircle of squad cars until they were directly across from the bank’s front glass doors.

“We’ll be with you the whole time,” Porthos reminded him. “Trust us.”

“Apparently.” He tried for levity, and it came out flat. He tightened the straps on his backpack, and eyed the space of pavement between him and those who needed him most. “See you in a bit, gentlemen.”

The hair on the back of his neck prickled when he was halfway across, and he barely resisted the urge to look behind him. He kept his breathing and footsteps even through sheer force of will.

If that was what it felt like to be in the crosshairs of Aramis’s sniper rifle when he _didn’t_ have the need to pull the trigger, John couldn’t imagine what it was like to actually be a criminal.

“ _Just me, Johnny-boy,_ ” Aramis murmured in his ear as though conjured there by sheer Jedi mind power. “ _You’re doin’ fine._ ”

John had one foot on the sidewalk when he heard Aramis say, “ _One, armed, waiting at the door,_ ” and froze. Looking through the glass at him was the business end of a rather large automatic something, and he continued to make himself breathe carefully.

“ _Keep going, John._ ” Athos’s voice this time. “ _They’re expecting you. He’s just there to make sure we keep our end of the bargain._ ”

He swung his other boot up and caught his toes on the curb, stumbling forward. He righted himself before he reached the door, took another spare second to gather himself, and opened it like it was any other day at the bank.

Except it wasn’t. There was a row of civilians sitting with their backs pressed against the front side of the tellers’ counter, most of them pale and shaky. He looked quickly for any overt signs of shock among them, and was satisfied they at least seemed to be holding it relatively together.

Those on the far end near the manager’s glass-lined office, weren’t doing so well.

The man with the gun stepped up to him, and flicked a finger against his vest. “You the doctor?”

“Paramedic,” John said reflexively. “I never finished med school. Too expensive.”

He tipped his head back and laughed; several people flinched.

“Patients are over there, doc,” he said with a small bow.

“ _Easy,_ ” Athos murmured. “ _Aramis, do you still have eyes?_ ”

“ _That’s a yes on the eyes._ ” The mic picked up a light rustling, and John knew Aramis must have adjusted his position minutely.

“Paramedic,” John reminded him, shrugging off his backpack as he crossed the marble floor to a man sprawled out on his back in a wide puddle of red. “Not a doctor.”

“ _John._ ”

Athos again, and John ignored him in favor of crouching as near the man’s head as he could get. His chest wasn’t rising, and John had a sinking feeling the man was beyond anyone’s earthly reach. Still, he slid two fingers against the side of his neck and felt for a heartbeat.

Nothing.

John gently shut the man’s staring eyes, and shook his head, just in case Aramis had missed the earlier movement.

“ _One casualty._ ”

He stayed in a crouch for a moment longer.

“ _Please confirm._ ”

Thank God for Athos and his carefully controlled forms of personal expression. John scrubbed a hand over his face, moved his head as though he were nodding to himself, and finally stood.

“ _John confirms._ ” Aramis huffed out a breath, followed by something in a language that wasn’t English.

He reached for his backpack, the usual simple twist of his torso impeded by the Kevlar. He turned on his heel instead, picked it up by one strap, and looked at the other hostages.

None of them would meet his eyes, though he had an idea that had more to do with Rue and his crew behind him than himself.

“I need to know who else is hurt,” he said, taking care to enunciate.

“Here.”

Almost in the middle of the row of people, a woman put her hand up. “My friend. She’s hurt.”

John stepped lightly over, and went to pull a pair of gloves from his cargo pocket only to be brought up short by the damn vest again. It was annoying, uncomfortable as hell, and, really, if they were going to shoot him, they were close enough to nail him in the head.

Which made him take a deep breath.

“Right,” he muttered, dropping his backpack and attacking the Velcro at his sides.

“ _John._ ” Aramis, once again in English. “ _John, you need to leave that on._ ”

“ _Put the vest back on, Friedline._ ”

He shuddered; Athos’s tone of voice made him want to crawl in a hole if for no other reason than to avoid any sort of facial expression that might go with it. The hair on the back of his neck prickled again, and he knew Aramis was watching through the scope of his rifle.

John lifted the Kevlar vest over his head, and, rather than simply dropping it, tossed it a little way away.

“Much better,” he sighed, kneeling in front of the two women. “Hi.”

“ _You and I are going to have words about this later._ ”

On the pretense of checking Rue’s position, John swiveled on his knees, and rubbed the side of his nose with his middle finger. He knew the message had at least been received by Aramis when he heard the man snort.

“Sorry about that,” he said, pulling on a pair of gloves. “My name’s John. I’m a paramedic. Where are you hurt?”

The lady to the left of the one who had raised her hand moved out from behind the shelter of the other. The entire right sleeve of her shirt was red.

“I can probably fix that.” He gave her his best smile. “And if I can’t, I can patch it up until you can get to a doctor who can fix it. How’s that sound?”

The pair of them nodded.

“Any allergies?”

“No,” she said, voice trembling slightly as he cut her sleeve off at the shoulder seam.

“That’s good.” He eased the fabric away from her arm and pulled it off. “On a scale of one to ‘this only happens in movies’, can you rate your pain for me?”

They giggled.

“Six.” She bit her lip. “It feels – it burns.”

John fished some gauze and disinfectant from his bag. “I know. I mean, I don’t – I haven’t been shot – but I can imagine it does. This is going to sting a little bit, probably, but I want to see a bit better what you’ve got going on.” He gently cleaned around the place where the blood originated from, relieved to see she hadn’t taken the bullet head-on but been grazed by it.

He whistled lowly. “You, my fair lady, are going to have a scar Prince Charming is going to be jealous of.”

“Princess Charming,” her friend corrected gently.

“My apologies.” He opened a single-use needle. “Painkiller. Little stronger than Tylenol but not quite like morphine. Ready?”

She nodded.

“Look either at me or look over at your friend. I’d choose your friend, she’s definitely prettier than me.” John turned her arm over gently by the wrist to look at the veins running up from her wrist. “On three, you’re going to feel a little poke. Keep taking nice, deep breaths for me, okay?”

“ _John? We’ve got a way in._ ”

He ignored Athos’s voice in his ear. “One. Two. Three.” He smiled reassuringly at her as he injected the painkiller in her arm.

“You did great,” he said. “Gonna wrap it, and then we’ll get you to the ER docs.”

“ _Teams are in position. The Captain will do one more round of negotiations. That will determine our next course of action._ ”

John took his own deep, calming breaths as he wrapped gauze and cloth around the woman’s arm. His shoulders tensed as a phone went off somewhere behind him.

“Don’t be scared,” he whispered.

“Why would I release the hostages for nothing in return?” Rue yelled into the cell phone.

“ _We knew he wouldn’t go for that. Elliott said so._ ” Porthos wasn’t all too happy about the situation in general if his tone was anything to go by.

“ _I still have eyes,_ ” Aramis said.

John shuddered at the building laugh bubbling out of the man still standing too few feet behind him.

“Show of good faith, you say. That might be alright.”

He knew an opening when he saw one. In one fluid motion, John stood and spun on his heel. “I’ll stay.” He flinched slightly when every eye in the room – including Rue’s – look unblinkingly at him. “She goes. I’ll stay.” He shrugged, and added, “Show of good faith and all that.”

Aramis muttered something in a language other than English, but it was Athos who came through loud, clear, and incredibly pissed off. “ _What the **fuck** are you doing?_ ”

While he might not have been a doctor, John’s first priority since becoming a paramedic after dropping out of med school had always been to the people who needed his help. He would use his knowledge and skills to do anything and everything he could, and if that meant becoming a hostage in a bank robbery gone bad in Canada, then so be it. Especially if it meant someone who required medical attention could get it sooner.

“I’ll stay,” he repeated. “You let her go.”

Rue stared at him. He must have finally seen something he liked, and he said, “We’ll send you someone,” and snapped the old school flip phone shut. “You want her out? Escort the lady to the door.”

John didn’t pause long enough to look a gift horse in the mouth. He helped the injured woman to her feet, and snagged his discarded Kevlar vest on their way to the front of the bank. She shook as he put it on her, flinching at the sound of the Velcro.

“Head for the line of squad cars,” he said quietly. “Walk, don’t run. Breathe. Everything will be fine.”

“ _Treville is there. He’ll make sure she gets to a hospital._ ” Athos again, who, if the short, clipped words were anything to go by, was still very unhappy with him.

He checked the snugness of the vest again, and then opened the glass door for her. She walked slowly and steadily across and up the street, finally disappearing behind the line of squad cars. He let out a breath he wasn’t aware of holding when he could no longer see her, and went to take his place among the hostages.

“ _She’s with the Captain._ ”

The cell phone in Rue’s hand rang again. He didn’t answer.

“ _Aramis? Any outliers?_ ”

Funny, John didn’t get the same prickling feeling if he was facing Aramis, rather than looking away from him.

“ _All hostages and other personnel are accounted for. The only one on the move is Rue._ ” Aramis breathed out. “ _Have non-kill shot._ ”

“ _All teams in place. Move on Porthos’s mark. Aramis, non-lethal solution on my word._ ”

Athos said something short and sharp in French, and whatever Porthos said was drowned out in a cacophony of broken glass, screams, and the sound of heavily armed SITRU officers storming the bank lobby. John grabbed the two people closest to him – one of them being the injured woman’s Princess Charming, if he had things figured out correctly – and shoved them flat on the floor, further out of the line of fire.

He looked up once or twice, peering through the haze, but otherwise didn’t move until an officer came over and got the line of hostages up off the floor. As the officer didn’t seem to have instructions to separate him from the others, he followed everyone out of the bank and toward the line of squad cars. He peeled off then, heading for Elliott, who stood by a QCPD patrol car gnawing on his bottom lip.

“You good?” he asked.

John patted himself down and couldn’t find anything that wasn’t supposed to be there. “Yeah. Left my backpack, but I’m in one piece. You?”

Elliott tugged on the neck of his own vest pointedly. “Oh, I’m good. I’m more worried about what Athos is going to do to you when he gets a spare moment.”

He swallowed audibly, and shrugged. Pulling his ear piece out, he said, “If you could, you know, give me a heads up when he was headed my way? That would be great.”

“Gird your loins then, you’ve got about five seconds,” Elliott said dryly.

“ _Fuck,_ ” he muttered, turning sharply on his heel.

It would have been one thing if it had been only Athos. It might have been manageable. John wasn’t one for second-guessing himself in general, but the sight of SITRU Team One bearing down on him, Aramis still with his rifle over his shoulder, made him question all his life choices since he was old enough to be classified as an adult.

“What the _fuck_ were you thinking?” Athos demanded the moment he was within talking distance.

“You want to be a little more specific about a timeline? There was a lot that just happened.” Which, as soon as he stopped moving for longer than five minutes, the adrenaline rush and crash was probably going to catch up with him. He made a mental note to be sitting down when it happened.

“Your _vest_.” Athos was almost chest to chest with him. “I sent you in there with Kevlar to keep you safe, and are you wearing the damn thing now? No, you’re not. You want to answer me why, Friedline?”

John put his hands on his hips. “Sure, Officer de la Fere. It impeded movement and prevented me from exercising my abilities as a paramedic to their fullest extent. That kind of shit doesn’t fly with me. So the vest had to go. And you know what?” He rocked forward, slightly onto his toes, and used the few scant inches he had over Athos to his advantage. “If I had to make that choice again, I’d make the same one. The girl had just been _shot_ , Athos. She’s not like us. She doesn’t see this on a regular basis. She’d been minding her own business in that bank, and then she’s bleeding. She and too many others had to watch a man bleed out in front of them, and if I can help ease that memory even just a little bit, I’m gonna do it. If it makes her feel safer to wear that same damn Kevlar vest, then fuck yes, I’m gonna put it on her.”

He was vaguely aware his voice had risen, but it seemed unimportant. The fact that many of the SITRU and QCPD officers were staring in their direction didn’t matter, either.

“And I’m gonna get her out of there, too,” he plowed on. “If that means that I swap me for her – or any other of those hostages – then that’s what I’ll do. It means whoever’s injured gets medical attention quicker. They have a better chance of survival. If that bullet had been in her arm? Her shoulder? She needs all the help she can get, then, and if that means that I have to sit in there with the SITRU lunatic of the week, then I’d do it again. In a fucking heartbeat.” He swallowed, his chest heaving. “You guys don’t have the corner market on that urge to help people. To protect them. That’s my job, too. We just do it different ways.”

It was only then, in the ensuing silence, John realized he had a wider audience than he’d originally thought. His cheeks flushed, and he clenched his hands into fists to hide his shaking fingers. When he felt less likely to spontaneously combust, he let his weight rest evenly on both heels, and looked Athos in the eye.

Athos slipped the tactical glove off his right hand and brought it up to rest on the side of John’s neck. He squeezed gently, and nodded once.

“Okay,” John murmured, oddly bereft when Athos took his hand back. He took a step back and swayed, listing toward Elliott.

No less than three people grabbed for him. Athos and Porthos were closest, and they steadied him, one on either side. Aramis and Elliott looked on.

“I know what this is,” he said. “I know exactly what this is. Oh, shit.” His legs shook.

“Deep breaths, Yankee,” Aramis said. He pulled John’s shoulders forward, pushing his head down.

It was as close to putting his head between his knees as he was going to manage, and he focused on sucking in breath after breath while the shakes rolled through him. His world narrowed to looking at three pairs of boots, the low murmur of voices above him, and someone’s hand, warm and sure, at the nape of his neck. There was another hand buried in his hair at one point, though the contact was much too fleeting and he didn’t know how to make it come back.

What felt more like hours but had probably only been minutes, he stopped shaking. He scrubbed both hands over his face and straightened slowly, mindful of the rush of blood to his head.

“John?”

It took him longer than he was comfortable with to focus on Elliott.

“Did you eat anything recently?”

“Breakfast?” He leaned briefly into the hand Athos still had on the back of his neck. “Didn’t get lunch.” He glanced up at Athos and added, “Kinda turned into a bit of a situation.”

“Don’t you start with me,” Athos said, the corners of his mouth pulling up. “You’re still on my shitlist.”

“Oooh.” Porthos chuckled. “Ask Aramis about that – he practically lives on it.”

Aramis rattled off a string of Spanish no one needed an interpreter for: _fuck you very much_ had the same tone no matter which language it was spoken in.

John laughed, tension easing from his shoulders.

“Food, though,” Aramis said, switching back to English.

Elliott shuffled his feet. “He’s right.”

“Yeah. For once.” He took a deep breath that was punched out of him when Elliott then said, “Have dinner with me.”

He did a damn good impression of a guppy, and finally managed to say, with some semblance of normalcy to his voice, “Yes.”

“Great.” Elliott smiled brightly, hands still hooked in the neck of his Kevlar. “Also, can I take this damn thing off now?”

“Yeah. C’mere.” Porthos abandoned his post at John’s elbow in order to open Elliott’s Velcro, and slide the vest over his head. He ruffled the psychologist’s hair for good measure, and then caught him in a headlock for a proper noogie when he batted at Porthos’s large hand.

“Ugh, no, shit,” Elliott squeaked. He’d given up attempting to pry Porthos’s arm from around his neck and settled instead for poking him repeatedly in the side with two fingers. “God, it’s like living at home with my brothers again. Get off. Please.”

Porthos let him go and stepped back.

John slipped his arm from Athos’s light hold and felt a little like he was free floating. He looked at Elliott and jerked his head toward the barricade further down the street. “Shall we?”

“Let’s.”

 

He’d heard about SAVOY. Everyone who was in any way affiliated with the Garrison had. They all knew twenty men had died in those woods, one had gone missing, and one had come back thinking the world had truly descended into hell and madness.

John had watched from a relative distance as Aramis pieced himself together again. He’d watched as Elliott did his best to help Aramis navigate the minefield that was his mind. And if there were evenings when Elliott would come over, sit himself on John’s couch with a beer and stare through the TV instead of at it, well, neither of them had plans to say anything to anyone.

As much as he was tempted to, John never asked directly how Aramis was doing. There were only a few things he knew Elliott held truly sacred, and doctor-patient privilege was at the top of the list.

Next on that list was good coffee, because, well, the man might have peeked into the heads of QC’s best law enforcement agency on a regular basis, but he really was _only_ human.

The ambulance crews had a slew of next to normal calls. One of John’s highlights was an older woman who had fallen. Despite the high probability she’d broken her arm and was bruised six ways from Sunday, she was in an incredibly good mood.

Even when they had her strapped to the gurney while he and Gene wrestled it down five flights of narrow windy stairs.

Gene muttered something under his breath as they took her up and over the bannister to make it around another corner.

“Our apologies, ma’am,” John said. “Mouth like a trucker, that one.”

“Oh, that’s alright,” she laughed. “Young men have always had that problem.” She craned her neck around to look at him. “Are you practicing for a play, young man? Your American accent is quite good.”

He grunted as Gene snorted so hard he almost let go of his end of the gurney.

“What can I say?” John gave her a crooked grin. “I’m a natural.”

“Oh, my _God_ ,” Gene muttered.

The woman tipped her head back and laughed. She was still giggling even when they accidentally dropped her off the last few steps before the wheels had fully come down.

 

The last time he’d seen so many evening gowns and suits in one place had been his senior prom. It had made him more than a little uncomfortable back then, and if he hadn’t been so focused on something else it would have done the same to him now.

Instead, he was more worried about the call that had come in from Captain Treville. He knew it was Team One, but who it was remained a mystery until the people in front of him parted like the Red Sea did for Moses, and he saw a scene that took his own breath away.

John dropped to the floor, skidding on his knees by Athos’s outstretched legs as he rooted in his backpack for the small pouch containing his EpiPens. He yanked the cap off with his teeth and used one hand to jam it into the meat of Athos’s thigh while reaching with his other hand to his neck to feel for a pulse. It was thankfully still there, though he couldn’t hear if Athos was breathing again.

“Come on, Athos,” he murmured, fingers rubbing over the injection site.

He administered another dose of epinephrine.

Athos’s chest rose and fell weakly, his breaths more wheeze than anything else, but he was breathing again.

“Lay him flat for Porthos,” he said, snapping on a pair of gloves and getting the ambulatory bag out. He fit it over Athos’s nose and mouth, and looked at Aramis. “I know you’ve had EMT training. Take this.” He kept his tone calm but firm, and the panicked look in Aramis’s eyes retreated little by little as his training kicked in and he squeezed the bag.

Kaci rolled in with the gurney as John established an IV. They had him strapped in quickly, and headed for the ambulance.

“We’ll take you both,” John said, pointing Porthos toward the front seat of the ambulance. “Aramis is back with me. Kaci?”

“Hammer down, I know.” She slammed the back doors shut with a grim smile.

“Hang onto your ass, buddy boy.” He looked at Aramis. “She drives like me.”

Aramis didn’t say a word, just squeezed the bag again.

John hooked a pulse ox monitor onto Athos’s finger and immediately swore. He was getting oxygen, just not enough of it. Gathering what he needed, he pushed the necessary drugs through Athos’s IV port, changed his gloves, took a deep breath, and did his first intubation since moving to Canada.

When he was done, he hooked the ambu-bag to it, and wrapped Aramis’s hand around it again.

“You’re doing just fine,” he said, though he didn’t know who – Aramis or Athos – he was saying it to.

He checked Athos’s vitals on reflex, pleased to see his oxygen levels had risen. It was then he took a good, long look at what the two Musketeers in the back of his ambulance were actually wearing.

Aramis glanced up at him briefly, eyebrows halfway up his forehead as though to say, _Yeah? What about it?_

“You guys look like something out of a history novel,” he blurted. “What the hell are you wearing?”

“Dress uniforms,” Porthos called helpfully from the front seat.

“They’re very comfortable,” Aramis added, lips twitching into a smirk.

“Of course they are,” John muttered. A little louder, he added, “You look like a Renaissance Faire reject.”

Aramis, to John’s great surprise, lit up a little, and said, in a comically awful exaggerated French accent, “At least we have better fashion sense than those silly Americans. Uh huh huh.”

John checked the placement of Athos’s IV while Kaci swerved around parked cars, Porthos cackling gleefully next to her. And if he was the only one to notice Athos’s eyes slide away from Aramis’s face and shut again, well, he let the unidentifiable feeling in his chest swell until he felt lighter than he had when they’d first got the call out.

 

Everybody and their brother knew Aramis post-SAVOY was a tad bit different than Aramis pre-SAVOY. John had taken the little twitches, the flinches – more so in the direct aftermath after he’d been cleared to return to work than later – in stride, and not thought about anything other than how he could make Aramis’s body language relax when he had to be in the clutches of the medical community.

So when Aramis had asked him to drop by the Garrison one Saturday morning, John hadn’t hesitated before saying he’d be there, bright and early.

He did, however, balk when Aramis made to lead him through the door to the gun range in the basement.

“Aramis,” John said, holding both hands up. “I – I don’t – I’m a paramedic.”

“Your job has, on occasion, proven every bit as dangerous as ours.” Aramis looked at him, brown eyes almost unreadable. “You walk that front line with us. Nobody’s bulletproof.”

_Nobody’s bulletproof._

John’s head tilted slightly to the side. There was something else at play, some deeper reason for Aramis to have brought him here.

“I just want to make sure you know how to do this,” he said softly. “I hope you never have to, but if you do, I want you to know what you’re doing and how to do it safely.”

And with that it clicked. Aramis wasn’t doing this because he thought John needed to start carrying a Glock like the rest of the SITRU, but because he needed to know that, if the situation arose, John could protect himself and those around him.

“Okay.” John nodded. “Okay. Teach me how to do this.”

Aramis didn’t let him leave the range until he could assemble and disassemble the firearm like he’d been doing it for years. His aim was a little high, and he felt like he missed more than he hit the target. Still, at the end of the three hours they were there, the hard set of Aramis’s shoulders had eased, and whatever John had seen in Aramis’s eyes he couldn’t identify had retreated once more.

 

“Now, I’ll freely admit I haven’t seen everything,” he said slowly, hands resting lightly on his hips, “but you have to admit this is weird even for you guys.”

Athos rubbed his forehead, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Did they tell you about the visit to the funeral home?”

“Nope.” John popped the p extra sharply.

“They tell you they think Aramis has a broken leg?” Porthos added from John’s other side as the three of them stared up at the massive oak in front of them.

“Didn’t tell me that, either. Kind of wondering how he’s doing such a good impersonation of a squirrel with a busted appendage.” He shook one of his own legs in a slight rendition of The Hokey Pokey.

“He had help,” Athos said dryly. “d’Artagnan.”

“Ah. Finally got your fourth, then.” John wandered a closer and craned his neck to see up through the branches. Sure enough there were two bodies almost neatly hidden by the expanse of branches, though how they’d gotten that high was anybody’s guess. “Not quite an ivory tower, but, well I don’t think either of them would like to be considered damsels in distress. Anyway. Hey, boys!”

There was a rustle, followed by a hesitant, “Yeah?”

He didn’t recognize the voice, and figured it was the new kid – d’Artagnan – who had answered him rather than Aramis. A little worrying, but John had done more with less in his short tenure in Quebec City.

“I’m John,” he called up, adjusting his position on the ground to try and see them better. “I’m a paramedic. Are you hurt anywhere?”

“Don’t think so. Not alone.”

John absently tightened the straps on his backpack and waited.

“Aramis is, though,” d’Artagnan continued.

“Any chance you can get him back down here?”

There was movement above them, and some garbled words that didn’t have enough sound to carry fully down before d’Artagnan said, “Uh, no, not really.”

“Knew it,” John muttered.

“You want me to go?” Porthos offered.

“Normally, as I haven’t climbed a tree like this since I was in my single digits, I would say yes.” He twisted his shoulders to check how his torso moved with his backpack; it wasn’t anything he couldn’t compensate for. “But as the only member of your team who has EMT training is pretending to a be a squirrel, and I’m a paramedic, it makes more sense for me to. Next time, yeah?” he added with a grin.

“Would rather hope there wouldn’t _be_ a next time,” Athos said, arms crossed over his chest.

“First time for everything.” John tossed the words over his shoulder, took off, and did his best to run up the tree trunk. His boots scuffed against the bark, gravity taking hold just as he wrapped his hands around the lowest-hanging branch large enough to support his weight. Dangling for a moment, he swung his weight back and forth until he could get a knee, followed by a hip, up and over. He sat up, grinning like a fool when he was stable.

Athos ran a hand over his face. “I refuse to call an ambulance for the man who came with the first ambulance I called.”

“You try so hard to be such a badass all the time, but you’re really a damn softie.”

Porthos hid a laugh in a cough.

“Friedline,” Athos all but growled.

John blew him a raspberry and climbed to his feet, using the trunk for stability.

“Johnny-boy?” floated softly down from a good fifteen feet above him.

“Hey, Aramis. Don’t move, buddy, I’m comin’ up.” He hefted himself onto the next branch, and looked down again at Athos. “You’d call me an ambulance if I fell outta this tree.”

Athos’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, I’d call you something, but it damn sure wouldn’t be for one of those.”

With three points of contact – two feet solidly planted, a hand on the next branch he needed, and his side resting against the trunk for good measure – John patted his free hand over his sternum and said, with all the force of a cheesey romance heroine, “You say the sweetest things, mon petit chou.”

He wished, for just a second, he had a camera because Athos’s face was _absolutely fucking priceless_.

Porthos doubled over with a guffaw, and then promptly began laughing so hard he didn’t make a sound.

“Did you – did he just – “ d’Artagnan’s voice came from above again, and was answered by a much more coherent Aramis with, “Self-preservation instinct of a _lemming_.”

“Pot and kettle if you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about, ‘Mis,” John said, chuckling at the stupefied look still fixed to Athos’s features. “I’m also not the one who’s somehow up a tree with a broken leg.” He kept climbing. There was a slightly hairy moment when he had to shuffle further out on the branch than was comfortable to fit himself and his backpack up to where d’Artagnan and Aramis were, but soon enough he was near enough for them to be waist-high to him as they huddled on their branch. “Hiya, boys.”

D’Artagnan’s eyes were wide. “Did you – are you - ?”

“I’m John Friedline,” he repeated. “Paramedic. Now, what kind of asshattery have you two gotten yourselves into?” He was the absolute pinnacle of professionalism even if he was still giggling like a teenager at having called Athos “my little cabbage” in front of at least one witness.

From the sound of it, Porthos hadn’t stopped laughing yet. Since Athos wasn't cursing a blue streak, John figured the man hadn’t gotten past his impression of a guppy yet.

Aramis shifted enough to put his head on d’Artagnan’s other shoulder so he could look down at John. “I think I broke my leg.”

“Can you put weight on it?”

He shifted with a wince, and after a longer pause than John was comfortable with, answered, “No.”

“How the hell did you get up a tree in the first place?” John shuffled back a little to eye d’Artagnan’s build. “How did _you_ haul his ass up here?”

d’Artagnan huffed. “Well, I…adrenaline?” He shrugged.

John rubbed the heel of his hand into his forehead just above his right eye. “Okay. This is going to be a long process, and might give Athos a heart attack to watch, but we need to get back on the ground.”

“Athos is stronger than you think he is,” d’Artagnan said as he held one of Aramis’s arms. Aramis tipped himself to the side so his good foot could balance on the branch John stood on, the two of them and the tree helping him stay upright.

He waited until d’Artagnan was with them to look him square in the eye, and said, “Oh, I know that. I know Athos has a spine like steel, and he’s not above fighting dirty even if he’ll swear up and down four ways from Sunday he’s a gentleman. And don’t get me started on what he’ll do for the rest of you idiots.” He slipped down to the next branch. “Alright, Aramis. Let me have your bad leg.”

“Detached at the knee or the hip?” Aramis asked dryly.

“I’m not particularly picky, but get a move on it. It’s only going to be so long before _my_ adrenaline stops fighting my vertigo.” He gave them a tight smile when they stared, and added, “I’m good with heights to a certain point. I’m pushing that point now.”

It took them another twenty minutes filled with cajoling, swears, mild threats of bodily harm, and, when they were in range, Athos’s best glare, to finally get back to the ground. The only thing that stopped John from kissing the grass at his feet in relief was the fact he had a patient in need of proper medical attention now that he was done with being a human squirrel.

“Porthos? Can you please get him off that leg?” John asked as he rounded on d’Artagnan, studiously ignoring Aramis’s indignant yelp as Porthos picked him bridal style. “I need complete honesty out of you. No heroics. You hurt anywhere?”

d’Artagnan shook his head.

“Gotta pretend I didn’t see that. Use your words, please.”

“No, I’m good.”

John grinned widely. “Beautiful. Keep the cuts on your hand from the bark clean, okay? I gotta see a man about a leg.” He clapped the younger man on the shoulder, resolutely didn’t think about how _much_ younger d’Artagnan was to any of them, including Aramis, and jogged after Porthos toward the ambulance waiting by the curb.

“Is he always like this?” he heard d’Artagnan ask Athos.

“He’s rather mellow today,” Athos returned slowly. “Must not be feeling well.”

He stifled a snort and headed for the next moment of chaos – namely, Porthos all but dropping Aramis onto a gurney while admonishing him to _stay still, you squirrelly little bastard._

 

From the sheer amount of people in the house, he knew they needed another team. He stopped in the doorway, looked over his shoulder at Kaci, and said, “Call in another crew. We need the backup.”

There was a woman surrounded by four children, all of whom seemed to be wearing at least a piece of Musketeer clothing. Aramis, with a quarter of his face bruised a nasty purple, seemed to be doing his level best to keep the five of them calm while Treville, d’Artagnan, and Porthos hovered over the prone form on the floor. Process of elimination told him it was Athos, though it didn’t quite prepare him for what he saw as he shouldered his way through to his patient.

Athos looked like he should have been dead.

John dropped to his knees and dumped his backpack on the carpet beside him. His fingers found Athos’s pulse – steady, but thread, and he knew if he put a hand on Athos’s chest he’d feel his heart trying to beat out from behind his sternum – and he grabbed a pair of gloves from his cargo pocket.

“Athos? Athos, can you hear me?” Clicking on the penlight, he peeled one of Athos’s eyelids back to check his pupillary response. “How long has he been out? Did he fall or did you lower him?”

“He collapsed before we could get to him,” d’Artagnan supplied.

“Great. Okay.” He pulled a cervical collar from the depths of his backpack, adjusted it slightly, and threaded it behind Athos’s neck. Relief settled under his chest at the ease of that, only to harden again when the man didn’t seem inclined to wake or respond in any way to what was going on around him.

Porthos knelt on Athos’s other side and softly said, “John.”

He looked up from where he was cutting away Athos’s bloodstained dress shirt to get to the sluggishly oozing wound. Athos’s clothes and torso had a corpse-like cold to them that, despite his training and experience, rattled him to his own core.

“Talk to me.”

John swallowed thickly, took a deep, shuddering breath, and looked back down at what was under his hands. “Dealing with probable hypothermia. They’re going to want to warm his core temp up at the hospital before they go about doing any patch job – not that there’s really anything to stitch together over here.” He gestured to the chunk missing from Athos’s side near his lower ribcage. “Don’t know what the doc’ll want to do with that.” He frowned, and leaned closer to Athos’s face, studying his chest. “Shit.”

Treville edged a little closer, caught between wanting to know how his second in command was doing, and knowing he needed to help Aramis keep Fleur and the children calm. Aramis was doing a fantastic job of it on his own, but Treville’s own sense of propriety was tried to win out.

“John?”

He temporarily ignored Porthos as he dug for his stethoscope. Without much preamble, or stopping to warm it between his palms, he slid it up the front of Athos’s shirt, and listened intently. He kept his expression neutral as he moved it to the other side of Athos’s chest, still mildly concerned he hadn’t come around yet.

“Sounds like fluid in both lungs,” John said, pulling it from his ears and looping it around his neck. “He had a cold, didn’t he? Before all the rest of this started?”

“Yeah,” Porthos said. “He was tryin’ to hide it when we got out to the house.”

“Of course he was. I don’t know why I attempt to patch any of you up when you think you’re invincible and don’t listen to doctor’s orders for shit.” It came out far more fondly exasperated than angry, and the bit of normality settled his nerves further. He looked over his shoulder at Kaci, who had finished hustling in the other ambulance crew, and was steering them toward four wide-eyed children. “We’ll backboard him.”

Kaci hesitated slightly before nodding, and striding off to get the board.

It took several long minutes, or so it seemed, for John to establish an IV in Athos’s severely dehydrated arm. He couldn’t run the drip at the speed he normally would due to the congestion in Athos’s already laboring lungs, and he made another mental note to get him hooked up to some oxygen to help with his coloring when they got him in the ambulance.

“Hey, Johnny-boy.”

“Let’s do this. Porthos? Come over here with me. Kaci, take his head.” They shuffled around Athos’s body with coordinated movements. Kaci put both her hands on either side of Athos’s head in order to keep it in line with the rest of his body as they moved him, while John carefully rolled him up on his side in order for Porthos to slide the backboard under him. Once he was flat again, Kaci affixed the foam blocks on either side of his head, tucked up close to his ears, and did the strap over his clammy forehead.

John winced with every Velcro patch he smoothed into place, effectively immobilizing a claustrophobic in place. He put the last one in place and couldn’t help but think back to a conversation he’d had in his kitchen about, roughly, the same thing.

_He rolled his shoulders, fingers twitching toward his coffee cup before he remembered there was nothing in it as he perused the sports section of the paper._

_“I got a question for you,” Elliott said, turning around so his back was to the counter._

_John looked up, the corners of his mouth twitching. Elliott wore his faded Buffalo Bills t-shirt better than he did, even if it was a tad tight in the shoulders. “Yeah?”_

_“How do you keep your patients focused on something other than the holes in their sides when they’re on your gurney?”_

_While he recognized he wasn’t the most cognizant of people at eight-something in the morning on a Saturday, this was a whole new level of random he wasn’t expecting. Especially not from a man who muttered about therapy strategies and the effect of puppies on a regular basis in his sleep. John was beginning to think it was Elliott’s subconscious telling him they should get a dog._

_“Generally, I just talk to them.” He shrugged. “Make ‘em smile. But I’m not sure that’s effective because I don’t think it worked on you.”_

_Elliott smiled, and glanced over his shoulder to check on the progress of the coffee pot. “Yeah. Let’s just assume I got so bored I fell asleep.”_

_John’s eyebrows rose. “You remember that ride?”_

_“Nope.” He rubbed the area near his hip reflexively. His eyes glassed over a bit, and he added, “I remember being put on the gurney and in the ambulance, something about Porthos’s funny faces, and then nothing until I woke up in a hospital bed thinking I’d died because I couldn’t feel anything.” His shoulders twitched._

_“Hey. Hey, come back here.” John stood and reached for the fingers Elliott had dug into his side, knuckles growing steadily whiter. “Deep breath.”_

_His chest expanded._

_“Two, three, out. In, two three. Out. Better?”_

_Elliott shuddered, and leaned forward to rest his forehead on John’s bare collarbone. “Yeah. Better.”_

_“Good.” John rested both hands loosely on the counter, caging Elliott in a way he knew he sometimes needed. “Question for you, then.” He took the murmured syllables against his chest as permission to continue. “Say, hypothetically, that you have someone who’s, oh, say, claustrophobic.”_

_He flicked his fingers against John’s ribs._

_“And that claustrophobic person eventually does something stupidly heroic to save the other idiots he works with – because they have absolutely **no** sense of self-preservation, **I swear to God** \- and he needs to be backboarded. Any tips on how to deal with that?”_

_Elliott picked his head up, and squinted. His glasses were upstairs on his nightstand. Again. “Safety reassurance. Let nem know ne is safe.” He tipped his head to the side. “Though, if we’re talking about ton petit chou, then the safest thing would be to get him to see how open the space is regardless of the fact he can’t move.” Scrubbing his hands over his face, he added, “I don’t know – he won’t discuss the extent of his phobia with me, and what he has discussed with me I can’t discuss with you informally or even professionally without the right paperwork.”_

_It was a hard line they both followed. Privilege was something they wouldn’t compromise._

_“And if that doesn’t work, well, there’s always sedating him six ways from Sunday.”_

_John bit his tongue on the impulse to say **not always** , and noted the coffee maker had finally stopped gurgling._

Even if it went against every instinct screaming at him to keep trying to coax Athos’s eyes open, for him to show _some_ kind of sign of life, John knew it was better, for the moment, if he didn’t. He honestly didn’t know what he’d do if Athos woke up, couldn’t move at all, and was caught in the grips of whatever fever-dream his brain tried to impress upon his reality.

No, it was better for everyone involved – including Athos’s already taxed systems – for him to stay blissfully unaware. John tried to compensate by obsessively watching his vitals all the way to the hospital.

 

“I hate fraternity rush season,” John said, nose pressed almost to the glass of the passenger side of the ambulance. The SUV coming up looked oddly familiar, if horrendously plain, and he gave a cheery wave to Athos and Porthos.

It was that time of year again, when SITRU teams took QCPD patrols in an effort to help out their fellow LEO brethren. D’Artagnan hadn’t seen enough to grow appropriately cynical of human stupidity yet, and John considered it a miracle when they didn’t get any calls from Porthos because Athos had finally snapped and shot someone somewhere non-lethally.

“Huh.” Kaci turned up their radio on the dash. A call-out for man collapsed in an alleyway. “Shall we?”

He checked the name of the street they went by, and knew it would only take about a minute or so to get to the location. “Let’s.” He waited until she called in their response to flip on the siren.

She did a hard left turn; his phone buzzed against his leg. He dug around in his pocket for it and discovered he had a new text.

**Porthos:**  
 **That u guys?**

_Yeah, that’s us._ He braced against the side of the foot well as she took another corner almost on two wheels, and sent his reply. The phone vibrated in his hand seconds later.

**Porthos:**  
 **Will take scenic route. backup just n case.**

_Appreciated._

“The boyfriend?” Kaci asked.

“Nope. He’s got…shit.” He tipped his head back and looked at the roof of the cab, doing his best to remember what Elliott had been mumbling under his breath about for the past week and a half. “He’s got budget meetings most of the day. Did you know he had a budget?”

“He’s the entire mental health department at the Garrison,” she said slowly. “Of course he’s got a budget. His budget is probably larger than our yearly operating costs.”

She had a very, very valid point.

“It’s Porthos. He and Athos are going to give us a little bit of backup.” He shrugged. “Just double checking we’re safe, I guess.”

“Canada has its crazies.”

“America’s got ‘em, too.” John looked over when she didn’t make any sort of comment as expected, and added, “And I don’t just mean the terrorists.”

The ambulance came to a stop a little way beyond the mouth of the alley and she let her head thump against the seatback. “You read another article about anti-vaxxers, didn’t you?”

“Maybe,” he hedged.

She stared at him unblinkingly for a moment, and then blurted, “You dumb shit.”

He got out of the ambulance, put his backpack on, and held up his arms. “I can’t help it Americans are idiots.”

“You do realize you’re _still American,_ right?”

“You know,” he said, dropping his hands to his hips, “I’ve got so much maple syrup and Tim Ho’s coffee running through my veins, I’m starting to think I should have a maple leaf and a fleur-de-lis tattooed on me somewhere.” He looked at her with wide eyes, and deadpanned, “I think I’ve gone to the dark side.”

“I think you should start filling out citizenship forms rather than visa extensions,” she said.

John paused, one hand on the door to swing it shut. “Or, I could get Elliott to propose to me in some kind of role reversal of that movie with Ryan Reynolds and Sandra Bullock.”

“Shut up and go find our patient, Snowflake.”

He knew he’d regret telling her the average snowfall for Buffalo and how they’d work through feet of the stuff even when other parts of the state or Northeast were shut down because of it. He had, however, thought he’d get a little more time to think he’d gotten away unscathed than he did.

At least she’d stopped calling him “Wing Sauce.” He still needed to find a way to make Aramis pay for that one.

Edging around the mouth of the alley, he looked for anything that might be vaguely human-shaped. There were some trash bags haphazardly strewn around an overflowing dumpster, and he took light steps toward it.

There was a rustle; something made the refuse on the other side of the dumpster move.

“Hello?” he called out. “Did – someone called for an ambulance.”

No answer other than the sound of something shifting around. John took a few more halting steps forward, halfway between the dumpster and the opposite wall of the alley. The few self-defense moves Porthos had made him learn required him to have a bit of space to work with, and the last thing he wanted to was to put his back tight against the brick.

“Sir? Hello?” The pile of bags and boxes in front of him abruptly stopped moving. John’s heart thudded in his chest.

A thump and the sound of squealing tires came from the mouth of the alley; John’s head whipped around and he realized his mistake as soon as he moved. He tucked his head down, and turned his shoulders to the side, trying to present a smaller target as a scruffy man in a multitude of layers exploded out from the pile of garbage bags, and plowed into him with a yell.

They went down hard in a tangle of arms and legs.

Something jabbed him in the kidney region from inside his backpack, and he spent a few frantic moments both wriggling out from under a homeless man and trying to figure out what it was. He came to the conclusion it was the earbud portion of his stethoscope as he gained his feet, only to have them dragged out from under him by a hand fisting the back of his pants behind his knee.

“Son a bitch!” Both forearms ached with the force of keeping his face from impacting off the dirty pavement, and he kicked out blindly.

“Steal my treasure, eh? The only thing you’ll be stealing time for is to spend it with Davey Jones!”

He was chest-down against the ground with a man who outweighed him by what seemed like a ton pressing down on both his backpack and the back of his neck. The unmistakable sound of a switchblade opening happened a little too close to his ear for comfort, and John froze, muscles twitching.

Backup. Porthos. Porthos and Athos were coming as backup.

_Wait._

John took as deep a breath as possible, held it for a second, and let it out slowly as the man continued to rant about his treasure. He liked to believe he was man with a fairly strong non-violence policy, but he was rapidly approaching Athos-levels of irritation and wouldn’t mind punching whoever had set this whole thing up – because it wasn’t anything other than a setup – right between the eyes.

“Special Investigations and Tactical Response Unit! Drop the knife and step away!”

The man jerked; John could see the glint of the blade from the corner of his left eye, and that was _way too fucking close_ for comfort. Or safety.

“He’s – he was goin’ after my treasure, and ain’t nobody gonna do that.” And with that, the man sat up on the backs of John’s thighs with all the regality of a king. “Ain’t nobody gonna take what’s mine.”

A statement like that should have had either z-snaps or crossed arms at the end of it, and John hoped for the former as the other would have meant the poor man would have probably stabbed himself somewhere in his own chest cavity.

“Corporate greed aside, I think it’s safe to say that anyone working in the public sector isn’t after glory and riches,” Athos said, his tone as dry as dust. “Much less whatever undisclosed wealth you have lying around somewhere. But we do insist you get off him, drop the knife, and put your hands on your head.”

Evidently, Athos wore an expression that said he was in the mood to shoot first and ask questions later, and the man finally complied. Porthos hauled John to his feet by the reinforced strap at the top of his backpack (he’d seen Team One manhandle each other by the backs of their vests, he _knew_ what was coming).

“Thanks.” He dusted himself off as Athos handcuffed the man and dropped the knife into an evidence bag.

Porthos nudged him gently in the side and offered John his elbow. “Walk you to your car?”

“And they say chivalry is dead.” He knocked his own amiably into Porthos.

“Ah, that’s fine. Where did you leave the ambulance, anyway?”

“Something like ten foot from the alley.” He had a sensation of cold water trickling down his spinal column. “It’s not _there_ >?”

“No. There’s nobody parked – John? John, wait!”

John took off for the mouth of the alley, and skidded around the corner, fumbling for his phone.

The ambulance was gone.

His case was a bit scuffed from where it had taken a beating in his pocket, and his fingers shook as he typed in his passcode. Five new messages.

**Kaci:**  
 **We’re out of extra large gauze pads, like you thought. I’m looking at our inventory now.**

**Kaci:**  
 **Johnny?**

**Kaci:**  
 **THEY’RE STEALING OUR FUCKING AMBULANCE WITH ME IN IT**

**Kaci:**  
 **THEY DON’T KNOW I’M BACK HERE. THEY THINK IT’S EMPTY.**

**Kaci:**  
 **HELP ME**

“In the car. Now.”

John crammed himself into the front seat, and reflexively caught the evidence bag Athos tossed at him before it could bounce off his forehead. Porthos kept their suspect – now oddly quiet – company in the backseat, and John was sure Athos had just broken about three traffic laws moving away from the curb.

He, on the other hand, was more worried about getting in contact with dispatch. Still, with the phone cradled between his ear and shoulder, he took the time to buckle up. Athos didn’t seem to be in the mood to wait for such petty things as green traffic lights and clear intersections.

“John Friedline, seven-two-five-oh-seven. I need to know where my ambulance is.” He clutched the handle above the door with white knuckles. “No, I’m not currently with my bus. Yes, my partner is.”

“Constance? Patch me through to Meggie, will you? It’s an emergency.” Porthos’s deep voice came from somewhere between John and to the right, and it served as a balm over his fraying nerves.

“You – I really – fucking _fine_.” He’d deal with the paperwork later, especially if it meant Kaci was around to bitch at him about the sheer amount of it. “You want to know why I’m not with my fucking ambulance? It’s because somebody’s _stolen_ the fucking thing with my partner _in the back of it!_ ” He was marginally aware he was shouting. He was more aware he’d run out of fucks to give about the previous statement. “Now tell me where the goddamn ambulance is so I can get her back!” He listened intently for another moment and shouted the same thing at the same time as Porthos from the backseat, “Anse-au-Foulon!”

Athos took the next available right hand turn so hard John was sure two of the SUV’s wheels weren’t anywhere close to being on the pavement. His stomach lurched, the wannabe pirate in the backseat gagged, and Athos flicked on the light bar at the top of the windshield.

He gladly hung up on the ranting dispatcher on the other end of the open phone connection.

To say the drive to Anse-au-Foulon was nerve wracking was a gross understatement. The tension in the SUV reached new heights when they found the ambulance sitting in an empty parking lot by a series of tennis courts. The only who didn’t immediately head for an exit was the man in handcuffs.

“Stay by the hood, Friedline,” Athos said, pointing to the front bumper of the vehicle. “Right there. You don’t come any closer until I say you can.”

He nodded. This was what the SITRU did. This was what they were good at, and as he watched Athos and Porthos move slowly but steadily toward the ambulance while staying in the blind spots as best they could, he was incredibly grateful it was _them_ there with him. There wasn’t anyone else – except Treville, maybe – in the entire Garrison he trusted with his life, Kaci’s, and Elliott’s.

Hell, there wasn’t anybody else he trusted as much in the world as much as he trusted Team One, Elliott, and Kaci. Period.

John tuned out of his head and back in to what was going on in front of him in time to see a flicker of movement in one of the back door windows. Athos and Porthos were nearly level with them, and if he’d been on the inside, he’d have wanted to use both surprise and physics on them as best he could.

He was moving before he was aware his brain had said to, while yelling, “Look out!”

They pulled up short; the door swung open, and a small dark shape lunged forward with something sharp in hand.

Porthos called out, “Needle!” even as he took one of the heavy doors in the meaty part of his arm. He was further out of the line of fire than Athos was.

Athos disarmed his assailant with a quick, sharp strike to a nerve; the needle dropped to the pavement and broke with a snap. He tried for a headlock next, mildly impressed when it was evaded. Barely, but still done well enough that his hold slipped a tiny fraction.

“Kaci! Kaci, it’s us! It’s Johnny!” John sprinted across the parking lot as Athos let muscle memory kick in a little more and subdued his attacker to her knees, one arm wrenched up behind her back. “Athos, let her up!”

He dropped his hands like she’d burned him. Kaci scrambled to her feet and launched herself at the nearest friendly face she knew. Which, incidentally, meant the man who had tried to put her in a chokehold. Athos caught her, staggering back into the open back door of the ambulance.

“They – God, they - _they talked about backup and I didn’t know what that meant and I was so scared there – there were more coming and, and I didn’t – they didn’t know I was there and I stabbed them after they parked and, God._ ” She had a fistful of Athos’s dress shirt in each hand and her chest heaved with the force of her sobs.

John watched, stunned, as she stuttered the words out in French. Athos said something to her; he could guess tone, but didn’t have a clue on the words. Eventually she calmed enough to step back, wipe the last of her tears from her eyes, and scrub her cheeks.

Athos asked her something, voice gentle, and still in their native tongue. She nodded, and then finally turned to look at John.

“Two up front, out cold,” Porthos said, popping his head around from the side of the ambulance. “Breathing fine, pulse is steady.”

“You did that?” John asked.

Kaci’s shy smile wobbled a tiny bit. “Yeah.”

“Goddamn, I am so proud.” He pulled her into a hug and rocked her gently back and forth. She had kept herself safe, first of all, kept the ambulance safe, and taken out the proverbial bad guys – both of them – at the same time. “God _damn_.”

She stepped back with a sick chuckle. “Ugh. I think – this is probably going to give me nightmares.”

John slung an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close, the hard ball of anxiety at the pit of his stomach uncoiling a little more when she slid her hand across his back to grip his shirt on the far side. “I know a good psychologist. Great one, really.”

Athos glanced up from where he’d been staring at his shoes while on the phone with someone, presumably Treville, at Kaci’s snort.

“I bet you do,” she said. She leaned a little more into him and added, so quietly he very nearly couldn’t hear her, “I’ll take a business card, if you’ve got one. I think I’m gonna need it.”

 

He was going to kill his boyfriend. A nasty strain of something part-flu-like, part-puke-up-all-your-internal-organs-in-one-sitting had been going around the Garrison. It was on its last legs, having infected most of the SITRU teams earlier in the months, and had since moved on to majority of the support staff. Rumor had it that Treville was the only one who had been spared, as though the virus, like most of the SITRU officers, knew better than try something so stupid.

At least that’s what Elliott had said when he was neither clogged so full of snot he couldn’t speak properly or throwing up everything he’d eaten since puberty. Thankfully, Elliott had gone back to his office at the Garrison that morning feeling fresh as a damn sunflower, and John had dragged himself down to the station with the beginnings of a runny nose.

Since Kaci was still on vacation (she’d taken the mandatory leave time, had more than the required amount of sessions with a psychologist, and then decided to take a vacation with her boyfriend to better clear her head). She was due back in a few days, but until then, it meant John was paired with Gene again and something felt…off about him. He couldn’t put his finger on it, and trying to was giving him a headache.

Regardless, the man had been nice enough to stop at the nearest gas station for John to use the bathroom and pick up another bottle of water. It was tempting to hook himself to an IV, but admitting he was sick enough for one of those meant admitting he _really_ shouldn’t have been working in the first place.

“Call out,” Gene said as John slammed the door shut and buckled up. “Told them we’d take it.”

“Awesome.” He leaned back against the seat. “What is it?”

“Team One bust.”

John flashed him a thumbs up, and they pulled out of the gas station parking lot. He was mildly surprised to see them heading out of the city proper on 573, but then relaxed. Criminals didn’t conduct their business on anybody’s schedule but their own, and they certainly didn’t do it, most times, in any place other than a cliché.

The seemingly abandoned warehouses off a paved access road not quite to Courcelette was one such place.

He looked around for the trademark nondescript SUVs the SITRU favored, and couldn’t find them. Then again, he couldn’t find any vehicles, and that probably wasn’t all that strange. It wasn’t like anyone would broadcast _nefarious business over this way._ Still. If they’d been called in it was usually because the action was over and cleanup was under way.

“Right behind you,” Gene said as the ambulance rumbled to a stop.

“Got it.” John grabbed his backpack and headed toward the only open door he could see to the left of the big bay doors that were closed. He stepped in, and refrained from calling out any names.

The place was lit only by the yellow safety lights in strategic places around the edges, casting pools of both bright light and deep shadows all around him. John’s heart beat hard against his sternum, and something slimy coiled in the bottom of his stomach. Something wasn’t right here. In fact, something was horribly, horribly wrong.

He eased the backpack to the floor – he could run faster without it – and turned to go back across the floor to where he’d come from only to find Gene standing in the doorway with a gun.

“What the hell is going on?” John asked. He could handle stressful situations. Hell, he’d stuck his fingers in Michele’s abdominal cavity and held his artery together so they could get him to the hospital. This shouldn’t have been a problem. It was small potatoes in comparison.

Except for how it felt an awful lot like a betrayal.

“You’re the one who’s buddy-buddy with Team One,” Gene said with a shrug, taking a few steps closer. “You’re close to them. You’re fucking their psychologist, for God’s sake.”

John reeled like he’d been slapped, and shuffled backward to put more distance between himself and the man he thought he knew.

“I mean, how much closer to their inner circle can you get?” He gestured with the gun again. “And when you get to the inner circle, it means you become expendable.”

“Expendable? I’m human, Gene, and I’m your goddamn ambulance partner!” He took a deep breath, well aware yelling wasn’t going to help the situation at all.

“You are doing a piss-poor job of explaining yourself, as usual.”

He twitched away from the man who materialized out of the shadows, hands at the small of his back like he was at parade rest. It was at odds with his impeccable suit, and John’s mouth soured with the taste of adrenaline. Gene might have been dangerous with a gun, but John knew without a doubt the man in the suit would shoot him just to watch him bleed out all over the floor.

“You are the paramedic they were supposed to snatch earlier.” The man in the suit shot Gene a dark look. “However, you get what you pay for, I suppose. They weren’t the best, if they could be brought down by a little girl and a few syringes of sedative.”

“Kaci,” John murmured. He turned to Gene, incredulous. “You set her up? Why? Why the fuck would you do that?”

“I didn’t set _her_ up, fuckwit,” Gene snapped. “They were supposed to take you.”

“You see,” the man in the suit continued calmly, smoothing his white hair back from his high forehead, “Team One is rather fond of you, Mr. Friedline. They have this annoying habit of coming to the rescue, and when they know we have you, whom they care for, well, you can imagine what they’ll do.” He smiled in what John figured was much the same way a shark did when it scented blood in the water.

John didn’t need to imagine what would happen – he’d seen it. That day at the bank with Rue and the hostages.

 _“We’ll do our best to make sure everyone walks out of there alive today. That’s our goal. Everyone walks out alive._ ” was what Athos had said that day at the bank.

His body ran hot then cold, and if there hadn’t been a gun in play, John would have stalked over and punched his ex-partner in the face. As it was, he vibrated with fury and asked, forcing the words out between clenched teeth, “What did they offer you? Tell me it was fucking worth it. Tell me whatever they gave you was worth at least four lives.”

Gene blanched. “Couple of million, a one-way plane ticket to a country that won’t extradite back to Canada, and not leaving here with any extra holes.”

The hair on the back of his neck prickled in a familiar way at Gene’s word choice. It was the same feeling he’d gotten knowing he was in Aramis’s crosshairs. John turned; there was a thud, and he staggered back a step or two, the air punched out of his lungs as it felt like someone had just clubbed him in high in the chest with a nine iron.

He blinked, took a stuttering breath, and put his fingers up to the hole just under his clavicle bone on the left side. They came away covered in red.

John’s legs went out from under him, dropping him on his ass on the bare, cold concrete, left arm flopping numb and useless in his lap. He opened his mouth, and all that came out was a high-pitched whimper as the pain of taking a high-caliber round through the torso finally caught up with him.

The man with the suit held his hand out, and Gene obligingly handed him the gun. John could do nothing but sit and wait for whatever came next as the man approached him.

“Call them.”

He bit down on his lower lip, and shook his head. He stayed as still as he could while the man patted down his cargo pockets and pulled his phone free.

“Call them.”

Jerking his head side to side, he flinched back as the man dropped his phone in his lap to grip his chin with one hand and press the barrel of the gun to the middle of his forehead.

“Ath – Athos will demand proof of life,” John rasped. “Kill me and you lose your leverage.”

The man in the suit glanced over at Gene. “You didn’t tell me he was a smart one.”

“He’s American. He’s an idiot.”

“He’s clearly more intelligent than you are.”

The gun withdrew, though John’s relief was short-lived as the man crouched by him and jammed the edge of the muzzle near the edge of his first bullet hole. The world went a little white around the edges, and his stomach roiled violently.

“Call Athos, Mr. Friedline. Do it now.”

John unlocked his phone and brought up his contacts as best he could using only his ring and pinky fingers to avoid getting blood everywhere. It didn’t quite work, and his hand shook as he pressed the phone to his ear once it began dialing Athos’s number.

“ _Yankee._ ” Athos’s tone was gruff, but fond with a slight hint of amusement. It was the same one he used with his own teammates.

Nothing came out of his mouth but a wordless croak.

“ _John? John, what’s wrong?_ ”

The phone was snatched from him before he could drop it, and the man in the suit pressed the speakerphone symbol as he said, “Hello, Officer de la Fere.”

Someone drew a sharp breath, and then Athos said, “ _Jean-Jacques Creslow. What pit of hell did you crawl out of recently?_ ”

“A shithole called Buffalo, thank you for asking.”

John’s right hand curled into a fist. That was his hometown Suit had just called a shithole, and while yes, parts of it weren’t the greatest, nobody insulted his city and got away with it.

Suit pressed the gun a little harder against his skin; John bit back a whimper and thought, just this once, he’d let the douchebag get away with calling B-Lo a shithole.

“ _What do you want._ ”

“You have a certain associate of mine in prison, and I’d like him remanded into my custody, rather than yours.”

“ _Odds aren’t good on that one, JJ._ ” Porthos, this time, and the corners of John’s mouth twitched as the nickname sent a shudder through Suit.

“Well, we’ll trade then, because I have something you lot are rather fond of. A certain paramedic.”

“ _Johnny-boy?_ ”

Suit looked at him oddly; John hoped his facial expression read _fuck off_ loud and clear.

“Yes,” he drawled. “Your favorite little Yankee is right here. He’s being awful quiet right now, but being on the receiving end of a sniper slug tends to do that to an individual.”

“ _You **what**?_ ” Athos demanded, and the icy fury in his voice was enough to make all of them shiver.

Then again, John wasn’t sure when he’d started shaking, and the shiver could have been a byproduct of his body fighting shock.

“A trade, Athos. My associate or yourself – I don’t much care which, at this point – for your little Yankee.”

His heart thumped uncomfortably hard against his sternum, and part of his hindbrain recoiled from the look in Suit’s dark eyes.

“ _I haven’t heard from John yet, Creslow. I need to know he’s doing alright before I can get anything in motion._ ”

Suit looked at him expectantly. John bit his lip hard enough to draw blood, a defiant set to his jaw.

“Really, Mr. Friedline? Such heroics.”

He refused to rise to the bait. Suit shrugged, a delicate lift of one shoulder, and pulled the trigger.

John screamed, fell backward onto the floor, and must have faded out a bit because when he came back Suit was speaking calmly into the phone in the same bored tone of voice one ordered pizza in.

“ – you didn’t specify what you wanted to hear from him. You can hardly blame _me_ for that, Athos.”

His head lolled and he sucked in breath after breath out of the reflexive need to get rid of the dark spots clouding his vision. He was vaguely aware he was lying on his left side, though he didn’t have the energy to move.

“ – of course. I look forward to seeing you in a little while, Athos. Bye, bye.”

Suit stood, and looked over at Gene. “Get him up.”

Gene gagged, then seemed to get himself under control. “Wh – what?”

“Get him up, and over there.” He pointed to a dilapidated crate in the middle of the warehouse, spotlight by one overhead light.

John brought his legs up to his chest and waited, focusing on his breathing. He’d get one chance, and it would probably hurt, but he liked his odds.

And payback was a bitch.

“Come on, John. Up and at ‘em.” Gene came within rang and John lashed out like Porthos had taught him, aiming his heel for the side of Gene’s knee.

The other man went down in a heap swearing violently. John rolled partially onto his back in order to give his lungs more room to expand and smirked. It was petty, it had hurt, but fuck, it was worth it.

Up until Gene staggered back to his feet and brought his heel down on John’s collarbone. Then John kind of overloaded for a little bit, and took a slight trip into the blankness of his own head.

He blinked awake, and nearly went under again as something tugged on his floppy arm. It ebbed and flowed, like water, and when he could finally focus beyond the haze of pain in his chest, he realized someone was in the process of dragging him across the floor. He was momentarily distracted by the smear of his own blood on the concrete, and he grunted when he was propped like a doll against something rough, but stationary.

Gene leaned in close, hands still fisted in the front of John’s uniform shirt, and hissed, “You’re fucked, Johnny-boy.”

John licked his split lip, and smiled tiredly. “You shoulda run when you had the chance.”

He snorted. “You’ve been spending way too much time with those assholes on Team One.”

“Yeah.” There wasn’t any point in fighting that statement, not when it was true. John leaned his head back against the crate, and looked up at Gene through half-lidded eyes. “But at least I got somethin’ to be proud of.”

The slow, hard beating of his heart was the only sound in his ears as he watched Gene limp slowly away, toward the door. He never made it that far, and John’s pulse drowned out the report of the gun and the flop of a dead body on concrete.

 _Loose ends,_ his mind supplied sluggishly. _No loose ends._ He breathed heavily through his mouth, and when he got tired of holding his head up, tucked his chin on his good shoulder and let his eyes close.

Sound filtered back first. Slowly, of course, and as though he were underwater. There were what he thought were shouts. Gunshots, maybe, and his body twitched in shared pain. He knew what that felt like now. Well, he did, sort of. He couldn’t really feel anything on that side. Oh, he could move his fingers if he tried really hard, but doing that hurt, and –

There was a reason he’d clawed his way to consciousness. He needed to stick with that.

Voices. Those were voices.

He rolled his head against the crate, and got bits of his hair caught on some of the rougher edges. It pulled against his scalp, and he blinked.

“ _Christ_ he looks rough.”

“How do you think you’d look if you’d been shot twice at close range? Not like fucking daisies, that’s for sure.”

Porthos. That was Porthos, and he sounded pissed.

John blinked again, and the world lost some of its fuzzy edges. Then it was like somebody turned the volume all the way back up on his ears, and he sucked in a sharp breath only to choke on it.

“Easy.”

“Relax.”

“Yankee.”

He looked for the owner of the third voice, and the chaos of combat gear-clad SITRU officers found Athos handing Aramis his rifle back on his way toward him. d’Artagnan and Porthos shifted around to Athos kneel next to him. He stripped off his tactical gloves and fished a pair of latex ones from John’s cargo pocket. Someone handed him some gauze pads – from either his backpack or the abandoned ambulance outside – and Athos slipped one under him where his exit wounds were. He held another to John’s chest.

John was painfully reminded of their first real encounter, way back when he’d started as a paramedic in Quebec City. He licked his cracked lips, glanced at Porthos, and whispered, “Wha’? You stop fo’ cof’ee?”

“We would have,” Porthos said softly, crouching on John’s other side, “but there’s not a Dunkin’ Donuts in about five hundred kilometers or so, and border patrol gets a little tetchy about shit like that.”

He grinned. He would have laughed, too, but knew it would hurt like hell.

“No, Yankee. Look at me.” Athos tapped him gently on the cheek when he zoned out. “Look at me.”

“Mon – “ John stopped to clear the burr from the back of his throat. “Mon petit chou.”

Athos smiled. Honest to God, fucking _smiled_ , and he couldn’t help but give him one back.

“Scale of one to ten,” Athos said softly, drawing John’s attention away from staring into the middle distance again, “with one being completely fine and ten being ‘don’t they make drugs for this shit,’ can you tell me how your pain is?”

He saw d’Artagnan mouth the words, eyebrows drawn together in confusion, and figured someone would clue him in later.

“John?”

Right. Athos had asked him a question. “One. It’s – I can’t feel it.”

“d’Artagnan, check on the status of that ambulance, and let me know when we have Treville and Elliott back on the line.”

_Elliott._

“Here?” He pushed himself up a little straighter with his right hand only to have his elbow collapse and send him back against the crate again. The thud knocked his air out, and he struggled briefly for a good breath in. “Ell’ott?”

“Relax. Relax for me, okay, John?”

He made some sort of pitiful sound when words failed him, and slumped back, his vision greying out for a few seconds.

“Ambulance is almost here. They want to know if we can mee them in the parking lot.” Aramis took his finger away from his earpiece.

“John? Let Porthos and I do all the work, okay? You’re just along for the ride.”

“R’de?” John fisted his hand in Porthos shirt when they got him upright. His legs went wobbly, everything sounded and looked like it was in a tunnel, and the only thing he could really focus on was the steady voice in his ear telling him to keep his head up and take nice, deep breaths.

“Yeah, buddy.” Athos carefully positioned his floppy arm across his belly and pinned his bicep in place with his own as he gripped John’s belt at the opposite hip. “You’ve got a date with an ER doc.”

“An’ Ell’ott,” John slurred, head resting against Porthos’s shoulder. His toes seemed to barely scuff the floor and yet he was moving. Weird.

“Elliott’ll be there, too. We’ll set you up, no worries.”

No worries. John could do that. The siren got louder and then softer. Athos had said not to worry. So he closed his eyes and didn’t.

 

It was mostly dark the next time he woke up. There was a soft light above him, coupled with the steady beating he knew to be a heart monitor.

 _Mine_ , his brain supplied. _My heart._

His left arm felt unnaturally heavy where it was strapped to his chest, shoulder immobilized in a sling and what possibly felt like extra padding for his collarbone.

Someone snuffled sleepily.

With almost exhaustive effort, John rolled his head on the scratchy hospital pillow, and smiled under his oxygen mask. D’Artagnan and Athos sat on the heater by the window, propped against each other, and sound asleep. Aramis and Porthos were curled around each other in the recliner John knew he’d use when he was stronger, and could get out of bed. There, in the corner of the whiteboard on the wall that told him the names of his various doctors and nurses, was Kaci’s untidy scrawl, accompanied a picture of a stick figure with a sling.

He sighed, fingers twitching, and he hesitated when his pinky brushed something different. Craning his neck, he looked down his bare chest to see Elliott’s untidy head of hair resting next to his hip. Slowly, because even breathing took way too much fucking energy, he moved his fingers and ran his thumb over the shell of Elliott’s ear.

The man sat bolt upright, glasses on the crown of his head, and scrubbed at the trickle of drool at the corner of his mouth.

John couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen such a beautiful sight.

Elliott took a moment to get his bearings, fix his glasses, and generally poke his mind awake that it took him a couple seconds to figure it out. John smiled a little wider when he saw the light bulb go off.

“Hey.” He swallowed thickly, and gently picked up John’s hand, thumb brushing over his knuckles. “ _Hey._ ”

John adjusted his grip slightly so he could finger-write, _Hi_ on Elliott’s palm.

“God,” Elliott breathed. He opened his mouth a few more times though nothing came out. “God, John – I – “

Painstakingly slowly, and well aware his body was demanding he sleep again, he finger-wrote another, well-used phrase. _I love you._

Elliott choked softly, and brought John’s hand to his mouth to kiss his knuckles. That was the last thing John saw as he fell asleep again.

 

 **Five Months Later**  
He ducked under the caution tape a QCPD officer held up for him, mindful of his backpack. He rolled his shoulders to ease the stiffness out of them – there was rain coming, he could feel it – and paused briefly to survey the scene in front of him.

The fire brigade was on hand to attempt to salvage some of the other bulk storage buildings. Many were still smoldering, and at least one was still on fire.

“Ho-ly shit. Look what the moose dragged in.”

“Shouldn’t it something like eagle dropped off, instead?”

John turned around and eyed the four SITRU officers crammed together on the open tailgate of a pickup truck.

“You two,” he said, pointing to d’Artagnan and Aramis, “are so hilarious I forgot to laugh.”

“It’s a gift.” Aramis grinned.

“Right.” John pinched the bridge of his nose like he was fighting off a headache but couldn’t hide his smile. Goddamn, it was good to be back. “Anyone have any blood, visible entrails, broken bones, or serious smoke inhalation?”

“No.”

“Nope.”

“No, but I think your cabbage might be a little overcooked.”

There was a brief moment of silence before Aramis doubled over in hysterics, d’Artagnan fell off the tailgate laughing so hard he was silent, and Porthos shifted away from from the force of Athos’s glare.

Sometimes John Friedline didn’t know why exactly he’d stayed in Canada. There were two things, however, that he did know. One was that he didn’t regret his decision to stay after his grandmother’s funeral, and the other was that he loved every damn bit of insanity that came part and parcel to working with the Special Investigations and Tactical Response Unit.

**Author's Note:**

> One last quick note: In addition to writing, I also work on interactive content for a [web series called MATCH](http://match.colaborator.com/season-1/), where each episode is a separate pilot episode that could then be made into a series itself. If you have a few spare minutes, check out some of the episodes, and peek around the interactive content. We'd love to hear what you think. 
> 
> And, as always, you can find me over in this corner of the internet,[wandering aimlessly on tumblr.](http://awonderingsagittarius.tumblr.com)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Everything's Better on Prince Edward Island](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3660042) by [AgarthanGuide](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgarthanGuide/pseuds/AgarthanGuide)




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